Tag: tfs

After years of resistance, I recently moved all my projects to Git from Mercurial (HG). In this post, I’ll talk about why I started with Mercurial and why Git won me over.

In 2009, I joined a new team at Microsoft called LiveLabs, back then the team was under Ray Ozzie’s org and they had an exception to use whatever tools they want, so we adopted Joel Spolsky’s tools made by his company FogCreek and Mercurial goes hand in hand with their build system Kiln and bug tracking FogBugz and wiki. Even the Mercurial tutorial is written by Spolsky http://hginit.com/

“Behind the scenes: Microsoft had it’s own internal tools to manage source code, builds, bug tracking, code review, but they were all shitty. For example, we used something called Source Depot, where back then,TFS (Team Foundation Server) did not exist and Git was not endorsed by the company ”

Spent a couple of years using Mercurial until LiveLabs team got dismantled then all the other Microsoft teams that I joined, either were still using Source Depot (shoot me) or they started migrating to the brand new TFS system which is similar to SVN. Until I joined Yammer and started using Git in a professional environment where I started to understand more the appeal and power of branching, pull requests, …etc

So Mercurial and Git are not very different, there are just some minor nuances which didn’t play a strong case for me to switch from a system that I’m already familiar and comfortable with until recently the advantages of Git over Mercurial increased and I’ll enumerate them here.

Hosting Services

Today, the winners in my opinion are GitHub for open source projects and Bitbucket for small startups, and they’re both great for established startups and large teams. Unfortunately, FogCreek wasn’t startup friendly few years ago, I just checked the website and they’re now providing Kiln for free for up to 2 team members, and I’m not sure how long ago they’ve added that offering, positive step towards embracing startups.

GitHub: Perfect for open source projects, you can have unlimited contributors to unlimited public repositories.

Bitbucket: Perfect for small teams, you can have unlimited private repositories with up to 5 contributors for free.

Kiln: Perfect for small to large organizations? I haven’t used Kiln or Fogbugz in a while, here are the two things that I remember, it wasn’t cheap but it’s the best tools I’ve seen. If you follow Joel’s blog and read his book “Smart and get things done”, you’ll realize that he has built an organization around the smartest and brightest engineers.